The environmental crisis is one of global society's most extreme grand challenges. One of the supply-side factors that can help cope with it is corporate environmental innovation. Based on the upper echelon and value belief theory and with significant empirical analyses, our results strongly support that the presence of women on the board positively impacts innovation aimed at environmental sustainability. The results are based on a sample of 19,800 firm-year observations of 2966 unique firms in 54 industry groups domiciled in 52 countries for the 2003–2019 period. The global distribution of the firms means that the sample is diverse enough to examine our main hypotheses. In addition, we show that culturally masculine societies, as captured by their grammatical gender marking, have a negative impact on such innovation. The masculine culture also moderates the impact of gender board diversity on innovation for environmental sustainability. Our results are robust to a battery of empirical tests and definitions, including instrumental variable approach and propensity score matching causality tests. We further explored firms' attitudes toward innovation for environmental sustainability by adding a qualitative case study research design to our quantitative analysis. That was based on semi-structured interviews with board members and executives. The case studies provided additional support to the results in the quantitative analysis part. This study's empirical results have various broad theoretical and practical implications for board composition, taking into account the linguistic environment of the firm.

中文翻译：

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董事会性别多元化、女性文化和环境可持续性创新

环境危机是全球社会最严峻的挑战之一。有助于应对这一问题的供给方因素之一是企业环境创新。基于高层和价值信念理论以及重要的实证分析，我们的结果强烈支持董事会中女性的存在对旨在环境可持续性的创新产生积极影响。结果基于 2003 年至 2019 年期间对 52 个国家的 54 个行业组的 2966 家独特公司进行的 19,800 个公司年度观察样本。公司的全球分布意味着样本的多样性足以检验我们的主要假设。此外，我们还表明，文化上的男性社会（从语法性别标记来看）对这种创新有负面影响。男性文化还调节了性别委员会多样性对环境可持续性创新的影响。我们的结果对于一系列实证检验和定义是稳健的，包括工具变量方法和倾向得分匹配因果关系检验。我们通过在定量分析中添加定性案例研究设计，进一步探讨了企业对环境可持续性创新的态度。这是基于对董事会成员和高管的半结构化访谈。案例研究为定量分析部分的结果提供了额外的支持。考虑到公司的语言环境，本研究的实证结果对董事会组成具有广泛的理论和实践意义。